A eight-member panel experts tasked to review privacy issues relating to online search giant Google Inc. has rejected late last week attempts by EU privacy watchdogs to extend the “right to be forgotten” ruling beyond the 28-nation bloc – see Bloomberg report below.

The European Court of Justice issued a landmark ruling last May that anyone living in the European Union and Europeans living outside the region could ask search engines like Google to remove links if they believed the online contents breached their right to privacy and are “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed.”

I have explained in my column last July that the ruling was Much Ado About Nothing as it amounted to everything but forgotten: what Google essentially did was to remove results from name search of those names approved to be deleted but only on its European websites. The same results remain on the Google US homepage and all its non-European sites. Furthermore, Google is only removing the results but not the links.

Thus no surprise there are now efforts to address these not-so-forgotten issues.

But as I have further pointed out then, the more devastating and often overlooked impact was how any “right to be forgotten” would be a much welcomed and God-sent convenience for “women with a past and men with no future”, essentially amounting to the “right to be defrauded” as it was also described recently by Jason Wright of Kroll.

In short, anyone in support and calling to extend the “right to be forgotten” ruling – including the Hong Kong Privacy Commissioner Allen Chiang who erroneously heralded it as a way to grant everyone a “second chance in life” – is not only pulling the plug on the free flow of information but also effectively facilitating the closing down of everyone’s right to information, which would derail the notion of free markets in this global economy if every individuals and entities could so conveniently erase their dirty laundries (like criminal convictions, litigation history, old debts and past bankruptcy records for starters) at the expense of their counter-parties who could no longer trace anything – especially if this ruling was blindly extended and embraced globally.

And I stress once again, the internet, originally designed to exchange raw data between researchers and scientists, has evolved into a self-contained, self-sustained and self-evolving ecosystem of records, communications, commerce, entertainment, etc. Any attempt to remove the contents, successful or otherwise, is like playing God.

Historians will mark the EU ruling as a (irreversible) seismic error. Extending it to a global scale will have no equals in the history of mankind.

Google Panel Opposes EU Data Watchdogs on Forgotten Case

by Stephanie Bodoni

(Bloomberg) — A panel of experts enlisted by Google Inc. to review privacy issues following a European Union court ruling backed the search giant’s bid to limit the “right to be forgotten” to websites within the 28-nation bloc.

“Delistings applied to the European versions of search will, as a general rule, protect the rights of the data subject adequately in the current state of affairs and technology,” the group said in the 41-page report. “Removal from nationally directed versions of Google’s search services within the EU is the appropriate means to implement the ruling at this stage.”

A ruling by the EU Court of Justice last year created a right to be forgotten, allowing people to seek the deletion of links on search engines if the information was outdated or irrelevant. The ruling created a furor, with Mountain View, California-based Google appointing the panel to advise it on implementing the law.

The geographic scope of an EU court ruling that forced the company last year to remove some search links on request was a “difficult question that arose throughout” the panel’s meetings, the group said.

Today’s report puts the group at odds with the 28-nation EU’s data-protection regulators who last year urged the company to allow people to seek the deletion of links to some personal data on the company’s main U.S. website.

Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, a former German justice minister and one of the panel’s member, said that she opposed the majority view of the group on the geographical scope of the EU court ruling.
EU Domains

Removal requests “must not be limited to EU domains,” she said in the report. “The Internet is global, the protection of the user’s rights must also be global. Any circumvention of these rights must be prevented.”

The Google advisory group last year visited seven European cities, from Rome to Berlin, listening to academics and public officials.

“It’s been valuable to hear a wide range of viewpoints in recent months across Europe and we’ll carefully consider this report,” David Drummond, Google’s top lawyer, said in an e-mailed statement. “We’re also looking closely at the guidance given by Europe’s data protection authorities as we continue to work on our compliance with” the EU court ruling.

The company has received 212,109 requests to remove 767,804 links from its website to date, according to its website.
Initial Split

The deletion of links beyond the 28-nation EU was one of two issues that created an initial split between Google and data-protection regulators. Regulators have complained that information blocked on EU websites shouldn’t be easily accessible by visiting Google in other countries by changing a few characters on the browser address line.

The company’s policy of notifying the media about deleted links to stories on their websites also sparked the ire of regulators. The report recommended that search engines “should notify the publishers to the extent allowed by law.”

“In complex cases, it may be appropriate for the search engine to notify the webmaster prior to reaching an actual delisting decision,” the panel said. “If feasible, it would have the effect of providing the search engine additional context about the information at issue and improve accuracy of delisting determinations.”

The BBC plans to publish a regularly updated list of articles removed from the search engine Google following the controversial “right to be forgotten rule”.

Google has so far received some 153,000 requests which have involved about half a million different link and 40 percent of these links have been removed. However, according to associate professor David Glance, director of the Center for Software Practice at the University of Western Australia:

“… there is a great deal of concern about the sorts of things that are being removed. So, for example, information about former company directors have been removed. So various people are now asking for that type of information to be restored because it’s part of the public record and important information when you are considering the effectiveness or the background of a company or the directors.”

If that sounds familiar, it has now become a reality but with reasons for concern – it has been two months since the controversial European “right to be forgotten” ruling. The irony is that nothing has actually changed fundamentally despite all the subsequent hoo-hah.

Let’s not forget the internet was originally designed to exchange raw data between researchers and scientists. Any attempt to manually and selectively remove the contents, successful or otherwise, is like playing God – much worse when Google decides what to delete.

I have listed an example to illustrate the lessons to be learned and price to be paid – of a somewhat similar attempt and the implications on the society at large.

It’s the one year anniversary of what is now known as the Snowden revelations, which appeared on June 5 and June 9 when The Guardian broke news of classified National Security Agency documents and Edward Snowden revealed himself in Hong Kong as the source of those leaks.

There is still much to decipher from the chronology of events in the aftermath and the sudden global awakening to the end of privacy. Among the impacts on the personal, business and political fronts, one interesting salient feature is the hypocritical rhetorical spats between the US and China in recent weeks, which could set the undertone for US-Sino relations for years to come.

Snowden said his biggest fear is that nothing would change following his bold decision a year ago.

Shhh-cretly Quote of the Week

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NSA Director Admiral Michael Rogers said at a cyber security conference in Washington DC Monday this week that the government needs to develop a “framework” so that the NSA and law enforcement agencies could read encrypted data when they need and he was immediately challenged by top security experts from the tech industry, most notably Yahoo’s chief information security officer Alex Stamos (see transcript).

Congratulations to Laura Poitras and her team behind “CitizenFour” in winning the Oscars for Best Documentary Feature. And did you notice Snowden‘s girlfriend Lindsay Mills was on the stage (see picture above (Credit: YouTube) and video clips below)?

This news originally from The Intercept, based on leaked files from Edward Snowden, shouldn’t come as a surprise as the NSA had been on a mission to Collect It All (Chapter 3) according to Glenn Greenwald’s book “No Place to Hide” (see above).

I’m a self-confessed hardcore fan of the good old IBM Thinkpad laptops but I’ve shied away from the black box ever since the Lenovo acquisition in 2005. And this (see video clips below) is one of those reasons. My tilt these days is towards those laptops with no parts made in China…

Here’s the video clip of Edward Snowden’s latest public appearance (via video conference) on 14 February 2015 at the The Davis Levin First Amendment Conference, to a sold-out audience at the Hawaii Convention Center in Honolulu.

Popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing can only access 5 percent of all the contents in the internet space. So that’s one good reason to be excited about the new breed search engine Memex, now at beta stage, developed by the US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) which is capable of ploughing through the entire web space including the Dark Web, that part (much of the other 95 percent) of the cyber ecosystem where criminals operate in the shadows to buy, sell and advertise their illegal trades such as weapons and sex trafficking.

Following my recent posts about the US and China spat on “intrusive rules” and the underlying reasons, I thought it may be apt to post video on understanding China. This TEDTalk was delivered four years ago so some of the points may be outdated and even disputable but Martin Jacques probably nailed it, especially on culture and unity matters.

Here’s one nice TEDTalk on why encryption is important for everyone and why breaking or weakening it – British Prime Minister David Cameron and US President Barack Obama are now pushing for a ban on encryption – is not a good idea. To put it bluntly and briefly, it is shooting our own foot.

I like to share with you this interview on the new book by James Risen, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative reporter at the center of one of the most significant press freedom cases in decades who exposed the warrantless wiretapping of Americans by the National Security Agency as early as 2005, 8 years before the Snowden revelations. Risen also hit headlines after being on Obama’s blacklist after he was threatened with prison terms by the Justice Department for refusing to reveal the source of one of his stories.

The BBC plans to publish a regularly updated list of articles removed from the search engine Google following the controversial “right to be forgotten rule”.

Google has so far received some 153,000 requests which have involved about half a million different link and 40 percent of these links have been removed. However, according to associate professor David Glance, director of the Center for Software Practice at the University of Western Australia:

“… there is a great deal of concern about the sorts of things that are being removed. So, for example, information about former company directors have been removed. So various people are now asking for that type of information to be restored because it’s part of the public record and important information when you are considering the effectiveness or the background of a company or the directors.”

A group of hackers known as the “Sandworm Team”, allegedly from Russia, has found a fundamental flaw in Microsoft Windows (a zero-day vulnerability impacting all supported versions of Microsoft Windows and Windows Server 2008 and 2012) and turned it into a Russian cyber-espionage campaign targeting NATO, European Union, telecommunications and energy sectors – by pulling emails and documents off computers from NATO, Ukrainian government groups, Western European government officials, and also the energy sector and telecommunications firms, according to new research from iSight Partners, a Dallas-based cybersecurity firm.

Some 43 veterans of Israel’s secret spy agency Unit 8200 has written an open letter of protest to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and head of the Israeli army accusing the agency of targeting and collecting data of innocent Palestinians for political and not national security purposes, adding that they have a “moral duty” not to “take part in the state’s actions against Palestinians”.

This relates well to a New York Times article last week about how the special relationship between the US and Israel – including how the NSA shared “unminimized”, ie. raw data (on Arab-and Palestinian-Americans with relatives in Israel and the Palestinian territories) with Israel unlike the sharing of only “minimized” data with other countries – has motivated Edward Snowden to blow the whistle last year.